An army of child tyrants is terrorising nothern Uganda FIRST the rebels tied Geofrey Obita’s hands behind his back so tightly that he could barely move his fingers. Then, telling the 16-year-old schoolboy not to scream, they sliced off his ears. Then they pushed him down to the ground and cut off what they could of his lips. “They were all over me, stamping, pushing, cutting. I could not move, I could barely breathe,” he told The Times in a barely audible whisper from his hospital bed in the small impoverished northern Ugandan town of Kitgum. Yet the child soldiers...

The moon is made of far more valuable stuff than green cheese. And one man wants to capitalize on that fact. NASA, which ended America's space shuttle program in June, says it wants to privatize spaceflight. Naveen Jain, co-founder and chairman of Moon Express, Inc., wants to go a step further: He wants to privatize the moon itself. Jain's company plans to piggyback on private shuttle flights, using them to carry his lunar landers and mining platforms to the moon. "People ask, why do we want to go back to the moon? Isn't it just barren soil?" Jain told FoxNews.com....

As a child growing up in rural India in the 1960s and 1970s, Naveen Jain would gaze up at the moon and imagine a life beyond his modest surroundings. Today he's still gazing at the moon, but for far different reasons. Jain, 55, is co-founder of Moon Express, a Mountain View, Calif.-based company that's aiming to send the first commercial robotic spacecraft to the moon next year. This serial entrepreneur-he founded Internet companies Infospace and Intelius-believes that the moon holds precious metals and rare minerals that can be brought back to help address Earth's energy, health and resource challenges. Among...

Long before the Chevrolet Cobalt became known for having a deadly ignition defect, it was already seen as a lemon. Owners complained about power steering failures, locks inexplicably opening and closing, doors jamming shut in the rain — even windows falling out. Long before the Chevrolet Cobalt became known for having a deadly ignition defect, it was already seen as a lemon. Owners complained about power steering failures, locks inexplicably opening and closing, doors jamming shut in the rain — even windows falling out.

If you're unlucky enough to be stricken with a rare medical condition, you'd better hope your doctor watches the right television show. That was the lesson for one German man with severe heart failure and a puzzling mix of symptoms including fever, near blindness, near deafness, reflux and enlarged lymph nodes, which baffled doctors for months. All of the symptoms had appeared in the last year, after the man underwent a hip replacement to replace a faulty ceramic hip. The 55-year-old man was diagnosed only when he was referred to Dr. Juergen Schaefer, a fan of the U.S. television medical...

In the early 1980s, a Taiwan steel company accidentally mixed some highly radioactive cobalt-60 into a batch of steel rebar. The radioactive rods were then used in the construction of 1,700 apartments. As a result, people living in these buildings were subject to radiation up to 30 times the normal amount received from the natural background. When dismayed officials discovered this enormous error 15 years later, they surveyed past and present apartment dwellers expecting to find an epidemic of cancer. Normal incidence would have predicted 160 cancers among the 10,000 residents. To their astonishment, the researchers discovered only five cases...

The dirty side of Toyota Prius The Toyota Prius is among the greenest cars to operate. But manufacturing the famous gasoline-electric hybrid can be a dirty business. Toyota studied the car's total environmental impact from factory to junkyard. Not surprisingly, the fuel-efficient Prius was better than average in its class of vehicles in lifetime emissions of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide and sulfur oxide, according to Toyota. But it was slightly worse than average in emissions of nonmethane hydrocarbons and particulate matter. Toyota says this is because producing hybrid-only parts such as motors, inverters and nickel-metal hydride batteries consumes more energy...

ALONG THE SOUTH KAWISHIWI RIVER — Just outside the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilder­ness, deep below the lakes and streams that have defined this area’s value for centuries, lies a fortune to be made. Everyone involved in Minnesota’s copper mining controversy agrees there’s an incredibly rich deposit of nickel, platinum, palladium, copper and other high-demand minerals under this rugged land. “The Duluth Complex is perhaps the world’s largest untapped resource of (copper, nickel and platinum group metals) with multibillion tons of geologic resources estimated to be worth more than $1 trillion,”

While the White House was engaged in hosting a Nuclear Security Summit in Washington D.C., a major nuclear incident occurred in India that escaped the attention of the international press. Five people suffering from serious radiological burns were hospitalized in West New Delhi this week from contact with nuclear material in a Delhi scrap market. The material has been identified as Cobalt-60 which may be used for making a dirty bomb. Indian police sectioned off the 200 market stores in the thickly populated city of 14 million and sealed nearby establishments within a one-kilometer radius. Scrap dealer Deepak Jain and...

Rising fuel prices, both in the U.S. and abroad, means that automakers can now offer similar engines in vehicles sold throughout the world. According to Automotive News, General Motors' next small car, the Chevrolet Cruze, will be offered with a new 1.4-liter force-fed four-banger, putting out between 120 and 140 horsepower and returning fuel mileage in the 40 mpg range.

SHINKOLOBWE, Congo (AP) - Business is booming in the mining zone that supplied uranium for the atomic bombs unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - despite a decree by Congo's president banning all mining activity here. President Joseph Kabila ordered the zone closed three months ago amid growing concerns that unregulated nuclear materials could get into the hands of so-called rogue nations or terrorist groups. Yet 1,000 miles away from the capital, Kinshasa, thousands of diggers are still hacking away at a dark cavity of open earth in this southeastern village, filling thousands of burlap sacks a day with black soil...

France accused of genocide role Kagame denies ordering the shooting down of the Rwandan president's plane in 1994 Rwandan President Paul Kagame has accused French people of "direct involvement" in the 1994 genocide. He told the French state-owned RFI radio that they provided weapons and training, and gave orders to those who killed some 800,000 people. He said the "French elements" were acting on government orders. The president was speaking a week after a French daily reported a police report that blamed him for a rocket attack that precipitated the massacre. "Sooner or later they will have to account for...